August 24, 2010

Broken washer update

Remember my washer woes of last week? When the washer at the beach condo up died an untimely death and we were going to be looking at a twelve hundred dollar replacement bill?


Like most of you, repair bills that have commas in them make me shudder.

Immediately I fired up my friend Google and started researching the price of a brand new stackable washer dryer. Since the laundry nook that is the condo is super tiny we can't use a full size normal stack able washer and dryers. Unfortunately it seemed that since the smaller sized stackable appliances are not in high demand they are higher priced than one would think and harder to find in stores ready to buy.

Frustrated I sent off a vent email to a close group of friends.

one of them wrote back " I have a extra one of those stackable sets in my basements. You guys can have it if you think it will work"

Turns out that when my friend bought her house, it came with an almost brand new stacked washer dryer. Then a few years ago she and her husband decide to upgrade to fancy new washer and gas dryer. So the stacked set has sat unused and they've been trying to pawn it off on someone ever since then to get it out of the basement.

We picked up the set on Wednesday of last week and on Friday Pete drove down to the beach condo with his younger sister sitting shot gun as his helper. He had a small four hour window of which to get the old washer and dryer out, the new set upstairs and installed. If everything went well it could work. If the job turned into an epic fail, when then the next renters we had were SOL and without a washer and dryer.

Thankfully everything worked 90% well.

That 10%? The stackable unit is about a half inch too large for the laundry nook so it sticks out past the folding door we had there. Oh well. It works perfectly otherwise and frankly at this point in time was all we needed. Maybe in the off season we'll cut the drywall away behind it to put the door back on.

When this all worked out so well, I felt as if it was all my built up karma points had been cashed in.

Total savings by DIY: $1,150.

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